Seamlessly read MS Excel files in R

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W. Andrew Barr

on
29 Sep 2015

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A long-standing hurdle to new R users has been the disconnect between using MS Excel as the primary tool for data-collection and exploration, and the intermediate step of importing data into R as a plain-text file (.csv or .txt). There have been a couple of packages which have attempted to solve this problem, but there have been external dependencies, and they simply haven’t worked seamlessly.

But now, with the advent of the readxl package, it is seamless to read your .xls and .xlsx files into R! It is super fast, and it can be installed on any platform! Wohoo!